Preface

This is a story of heroes of the Holocaust. The heroes are the parents of young Jewish children. The heroes are the women of a Belgian rescue committee. The heroes are young Swiss people who risked hardship in Vichy France over security at home to save refugee children’s lives. They are ordinary French country folk who befriended and hid Jewish children. Above all, the heroes are the children themselves. They endured hardships and persecution and escaped across hostile and closely guarded borders. Some even chose to become Resistance fighters and Allied soldiers. And they include a humanitarian Swiss pastor who started to research and write this book until premature death intervened in 2003.

I was one of the children, but I never intended to write a book. In fact, for fifty years I had no contact with any of my wartime companions. I was able to emigrate from Vichy France to the United States in 1941, served in the US Army in France and Germany until 1946, and then put the whole history of Nazi persecution behind me. In 1943 I became a US citizen, changed my name from Werner Rindsberg to Walter Reed and never looked back.

During a return to southern France in 1997 to show my family the sites of my wartime children’s refugee colony, we discovered for the first time what happened to my La Hille companions after I left them in August 1941. From several excellent memoirs published in the 1990’s and through personal contact with rediscovered La Hille companions all over the world I learned the astounding details of their persecution and of their desperate attempts to escape.

When Swiss theologian and historian Dr. Theo Tschuy decided to write a carefully documented history of the Children of La Hille in early 2002, I enthusiastically offered to support and assist him, for I felt that the complete story of our colony would add meaningfully to the understanding of Nazi persecution of Jewish children.

My new friend, Theo Tschuy, decided from the beginning to focus this history on the topic of “children as victims of war” and to base his book entirely on thoroughly researched documentation. Regrettably, incurable cancer terminated Theo Tschuy’s life in late 2003 before he could complete the research of our history. Gradually the obligation to carry on his intentions and his work became my mission and my objective. It is now my book as well as his. Above all it is the book of all the Children of La Hille.